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would rather begin quietly. Certainly the difficulty about authentic books is 
enormous. You can get Phanerogamic books, Sowerby’s English Botany for 
instance, with a coloured plate of every flowering plant, for a certain number of 
sovereigns, or Bentham’s British Flora uncoloured, for the same amount of 
shillings ; but who shall give a notion as to the cost of the valuable books and 
plates scattered here and there which bear on Cryptogamic botany taking the 
Fungi alone? The difficulty to a beginner would be enough to astonish him if 
only he could realise it. 
Then look at the nomenclature of Fungi, how one author of eminence calls 
a certain growth by one name, another calls it by another name, and very natu- 
rally so too, for this branch of study has not arrived at so perfect a state that we 
can detect the various steps of growth from the juvenile form to full ripeness, 
You know for a certainty that if life be continued the infant of to-day will be the 
man by-and-bye ; but the various connecting links in the chain of growth in Fungi 
are by no means so indisputable. Perseverance coupled with other constitutional 
ingredients are needed before you can convince yourself and others that a 
Cladosporium will necessarily become a Spheria, that an @eidium must develope 
into a Puccinia. Because one Geidium has been traced upwards and onwards, 
you must not with the Germans conclude that all (cidia do the same. Analogy 
makes suggestions, but suggestions are not infallibilities. It is the jumping at 
conclusions which damages very considerably the good cause of science. As study 
is prosecuted by the lovers of fungology it is to be hoped that the nomenclature of 
Fungi may become easier, but it wants very exact work, it wants the accumulative 
results of the cleverest minds in the wide wide world, it wants a thorough know- 
ledge of the gradual growth of all the Fungi, just as men know the growth of oaks 
from acorns. The gradual developements of all the microscopical fungi must and 
will be severe, we cannot see them without artificial help, and of course cannot be 
always examining them. If the study of the anatomy of a caterpillar be worth a 
life time, what becomes of fungology ? Its difficulties must be immense and will 
be. The nomenclature will rectify itself by degrees, retaining however its classical 
terms. Let each of us try and contribute our quota fragmentary, though it may 
be to the ease and benefit of those who may reap our labours when our work is 
done. And whilst we look at these and kindred trials, we may positively start 
upon the conviction that not a single growth is a growth of chance, all grows on 
fixed laws decreed by God. Our superstructure may be uncertain, but certain is 
the primary step from which fungoid life starts. We may go astray through im- 
perfect knowledge and want of clear insight, but we may be sure that our errors 
are from the feeble powers man now has. For the present we know that fungoid life 
Serves a very high purpose, as does all the scheme of creation. Everything is neces- 
sary, and when we attain a higher state of perfection possibly we shall wonder at 
the diminutiveness of our study now. Still for the present we say about all forms 
of life, ‘For God’s pleasure they are and were created,” and we may comfort 
ourselves by the assurance that no study on earth will attain an easy and infallible 
